Jade's skin was waxy pale with dark rings beneath her eyes when we met in January.

She was already seriously ill – far more so than either she or I realised at the time.

But when she started talking about her sons, Freddy and Bobby, her eyes flashed with such ferocious passion it dispelled any idea she was a fragile victim.

‘‘The only person in the world who is good enough for my kids is me,” she said, trying to confront the problem of who would look after them if she died. “That is why I have to stick around for them.”

When Jade spoke, with the threat of a lioness defending her cubs, it seemed that nothing – not even cancer – would be able to defeat her.

Today, tragically, we know different.

I had three long conversations with Jade back then. She was coming to terms with having just a 40 per cent chance of survival – a statistic which dropped like a stone over the following weeks.

Her hair had already fallen out in clumps and a bruise on her chest marked the spot where chemotherapy drugs were being pumped into her heart. The focus of all our conversations, just like the focus of her life, was her sons.

She was racked with worry about how Bobby and Freddy would cope without her around.

“That’s what keeps me awake at night,” she confided. “I worry so much about what will happen to my kids if I’m not here – where they’ll go to school and what they will be like.”

Over the weeks that followed, the need to earn enough money to pay her sons’ school fees became almost obsessive – it drove her on to complete magazine deals and television filming schedules long after most other people would have preferred to lie quietly in a hospital ward.

“It’s all down to me,” she explained, without a shred of self-pity. “I’ve got to get it sorted because their Dad, Jeff, wouldn’t send them to private school and my family haven’t got any money. I know some people don’t think private school is all that, but they’re happy there and I’m determined to give them the best possible start in life.”

As Jade talked about safeguarding her boys’ future, the thoughts which had been churning over in her mind tumbled out into the open.

“The other day Bobby was staying round his Dad’s and got upset because he made a mistake on his homework,” Jade said.

“I was on the phone to his Dad saying, ‘Didn’t you tell him not to worry and to rub it out?’ but his Dad said he was cooking tea and Bobby was using a pen, so he couldn’t rub it out.

“But I always sit next to Bobby when he does his homework and I sort the tea out later. And what was he doing letting him do it in pen?

Homework is supposed to be done in pencil!

“It might sound silly, but then I’m awake all night thinking, ‘God, if I die, will Bobby’s homework always get done in pen and not pencil?

And will their Dad think to make sure they have a clean shirt every morning? And ironed, too?’ Do you know what I mean?”

Oh yes, Jade. There can’t be a mother in the country who wouldn’t understand that feeling of terror that our kids might suffer in even the most minor way because we weren’t there to look out for them.

With Jade now gone, there may be days Bobby and Freddy go to school in a shirt not freshly washed. Or ironed. And there may be days their homework isn’t done in pencil.

That’s no disrespect to Jeff, it is just that there are some things only a mum can do.

But even if she isn’t sitting beside them, Jade will be, as she promised, watching over them.

And with the amount of love she lavished on them in their first years, her adored boys have already had the very best start in life.